Tuesday, December 9, 2014

The Pin-tailed Parrotfinches (Erythrura prasina) at Chupak continued to prove quite a draw. The following Tuesday, on September 3, 2013, I found myself heading for Chupak again – this time for a morning trip with Vincent Wong. The birds were still there, feeding in a patch of rice that was due to be harvested that very afternoon - to our considerable pleasure, if not that of the local villagers, whose bird-scaring banners continued to wave (with limited results) above the rice stalks.

Once again, I was only able to get some distant photographs, and none of the birds perched and feeding on the rice (which always seem to happen just out of sight).

These aren't great photos by any means, but at least they show the birds' colours.

Vincent, however, was determined to do better, and came prepared with tripod, powerful telephoto lens, and a portable blind where he spent a good hour – no mean feat in the growing heat of the day.

Unfortunately, the birds never came near him.

While Vincent sat sweltering in his hide, I took a stroll along the dikes between the paddies to see what else was around.

That included emergent water-plants. This looks something like Water-Hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) but I'm not at all sure that that is what it is.

A knot of Pacific Golden Plovers (Pluvialis fulva) flew overhead, and unidentified (and probably unidentifiable) snipe, also in flight, passed by with a few Wood Sandpipers (Tringa glareola). These Intermediate Egrets (Egretta intermedia), though, were easier to photograph.

Parties of Scaly-breasted Munias (Lonchura punctulata) flew intermittently out of the rice.

As the sun grew stronger, the birds grew quiet, the insects became more active, and I turned my attention to the local entemofauna. I watched fat black Giant Capenter Bees (Xylocopa latipes) trundle through the air from flower to flower.

Other flowers brought in a few butterflies. This is probably a Striped Albatross (Appias olferna).

A male Diplacodes trivialis posed on the pathway, where he was quite difficult to spot among the stones.

Rhyothemis phyllis tended to perch higher, on the tips of reed-stalks.

This dragonfly has a habit, on perching, of waving its wings back and forth - a bt like an old-fashioned biplane waving its wings in salute.

Brachydiplax chalybea was common here, as it is in many open places around Kuching.

By contrast, this little dragonfly - though apparently not rare - was entirely new to me. It is a female of one of the most peculiar-looking of dragonflies, Acisoma panorpoides. Its peculiar, bottle-shaped abdomen is, at least among Malaysian dragonflies, unique.

Acisoma (judging by my limited later experience with it) is, despite its odd looks, an unobtrusive species that seems to keep low in the vegetation and is easy to overlook. Probably that's why I had never seen it before.

This is an exuvium, the cast-off skin of a dragonfly nymph that has climbed out of the water, spread its wings, and is (by now) flying around the rice paddies somewhere. It appears to be the exuvium of a gomphid rather than, like the adult dragonflies in this post, a libellulid - the rounded abdomen and swollen, club-like antennae are characteristic. The only gomphid I have seen in Chupak is the common Ictinigomphus decoratus, so that is probably what this is.

I usually don't show corpses, but this - probably beheaded by one of the farmers, though in life it was a perfectly harmless creature - is the body of a quite interesting reptile. It is a Sunbeam Snake (Xenopeltis unicolor), one of only two species in the Asian family Xenopeltidae. Though it spends much of its life underground, emerging at night in search of frogs, mice and other snakes, its scales are highly iridescent (hence the name). One wonders why. Besides being beheaded by rice farmers, Sunbeam Snakes are victims - in large numbers - of both the skin and pet trades (in the latter case, despite the fact that they are difficult to keep).

I have often wondered what lives beneath the waters at Chupak, so these fish were particularly interesting. They are probably a species of Rasbora, perhaps the endemic R. sarawakensis although that is supposed to be a fish of rainforest streams. Outside Southeast Asia (and often enough within it) rasboras are "aquarium fishes", a designation that suggests that they evolved in glass tanks. It is usefulto be reminded that even aquarium fishes have, or had, a home in the wild somewhere.

Monday, December 8, 2014

By August 25, 2013, clutching a clean bill of health from my doctor and the quickest ticket purchase I could manage, I was back with Eileen in Kuching. The delay, though, meant I had only a couple of weeks before we headed off for a planned trip to Western Australia, so I didn't really expect to collect a lot of bloggable experiences (especially with a new grandson to fuss over). Sarawak always has its surprises, though!

On August 29th I got an email from Anthony Wong inviting me to join him for a late afternoon run to Chupak, one of our favourite birding sites. The lure: a recent sighting there by Daniel Kong of about 80 Pin-tailed Parrotfinches (Erythrura prasina), a bird we had been seeking at Chupak for years. We had long suspected that these elusive, nomadic little birds must invade the extensive paddies when the rice was ripe for harvesting, but connecting with them at just the right time was another matter. This, we hoped, was our chance.

When we arrived, we could see that most of the rice had already been harvested. This had the advantage, though, of concentrating any rice-eating birds into the few remaining patches. Of course, when I say "advantage" I am talking about birders; the farmers detest the birds, and do everything they can to repel them. Unharvested patches were easy to spot: we just had to look for the collections of white streamers, hanging articles of clothing, scarecrow and other devices set out to repel the marauders.

And there they were: in almost the first patch we visited, a busy flock of parrotfinches, diving in and out of the rice. The light was behind them, so we could not see their brilliant colours to advantage: but their rich tawny bellies stood out enough to let us know at once that we were not dealing with the usual crop of rice-eaters (Chestnut, Dusky and Scaly-breasted Munias (Lonchura atricapilla, fuscans and punctulata respectively, all there too in abundance).

The birds were not close, were constantly in motion and did not give us long before they swirled off to wherever was their next destination (and we soon had to vacate the area to avoid blocking traffic on the narrow road between the paddies). These are unquestionably not ideal photographs: consider them as "record shots" only. Notice, though, the unusually long and tapering wings (and, of course, the extended tail plumes), giving the birds a very different "jizz" from their munia companions. And besides, they were Pin-tailed Parrotfinches, and they were in the bag!

Heartened, we moved on to the second find of the day. Only a few weeks earlier, Baya Weavers (Ploceus philippinus) - a species not even on the official Sarawak list - had been found nesting at Chupak. Presumably they were recent immigrants, moving into the area as more and more of Sarawak is converted to open country (as has another open-country species, the Long-tailed Shrike (Lanius schach)). We saw three birds, a male that flew off quickly, and these two, which are either females or young males.

The usual attraction for birders at Chupak, though, are not finches (or finch-like birds), but waterbirds. Migrants like these Wood Sandpipers (Tringa glareola) had already arrived from the north.

Residents include an assemblage of rails. This is a White-breasted Waterhen (Amaurornis phoenicurus).

The star waterbird is certainly the Greater Painted-Snipe (Rostratula benghalensis), already celebrated here in its own posting. This is a female, the more colourful sex.

While Anthony turned his long lens on waterbirds out one side of the car, I stepped out on the other to investigate a patch of weedy open water, in a canal at the edge of the paddy, for dragonflies and damselflies.

I had already photographed a few common species while watching for parrotfinches; this is Orthetrum testaceum.

On the canal, female Common Bluetail damselflies (Ischnura senegalensis) were ovipositing on the surface vegetation (much as I had seen their North American cousin the Eastern Forktail (I. verticalis) do only days earlier in Ontario - see my last post)…

…while the males kept watch from above.

A female Diplacodes trivialis looked like a pint-size version of the commoner Orthetrum sabina.

As I said in a recent post about Ontario dragonflies, the male Brachydiplax chalybea is a remarkable ringer for the Blue Dasher (Pachydiplax longipennis), a dragonfly I have often seen in North America, even to the orange on the belly. This one perched on a grassy stem…

…only to be constantly challenged by a dragonfly I had never seen before, a bright red insect with conspicuous white patches decorating its wings.This was a male Tholymis tillarga, one of the most widespread dragonflies in the world. It ranges from West Africa across tropical Asia to the islands of the Pacific. Like the even more widespread (indeed global) Wandering Glider (Pantala flavescens), it is a long-distance migrant.

Why had I never seen it before? Probably because I have rarely been at Chupak in the late afternoon. Tholymis tillarga is a crepuscular dragonfly, only emerging from its resting place in the vegetation after about 4 PM. Are its white wing spots an adaptive response to the need to be conspicuous in low light? You could say the same about another dusk-haunting dragonfly around Kuching, Zyxomma obtusum, whose entire body is ghostly pale.

The male tillarga spent most of his time hovering over the open water, apparently guarding a yellow-bodied female, busy depositing her eggs in repeated short dashes over the water. So swiftly did she dart back and forth that I was never able to photograph her.

The canal attracted other insects as well. Water striders (Gerridae) skated over the surface...

Finally we headed triumphantly towards the road home, but not before I snapped a Cinnamon Bittern (Ixobrychus cinnamomeus) protruding from the grass. Definitely a triumphant few hours - parrot finches and all.

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Ron and Eileen

I am a Canadian, a wildlife conservationist, naturalist, writer, birder and all-around fortunate fellow. I have been able to make use of my experiences in my books about science, nature and conservation.
I live in Canada, but thanks to my wife Eileen Yen I now spend part of each year in Sarawak, Malaysia.